it was said, nothing happens to the order of the world that does not
happen to humans, and vice versa. There is no classification of ani-
mals or plants that cannot be observed in the social order, and no so-
cial classification that cannot be observed in the divisions between
natural beings. But the increasingly subtle anthropologists quickly no-
ticed that they were still demonstrating an intolerable ethnocentrism,
since they were insisting on the abolition of a difference that was of no
interest whatsoever to the people they were studying. By asserting that
other cultures brought the natural order and the social order into “cor-
respondence,” the anthropologists were still taking this division for
granted, maintaining that it was in some sense in the nature of things.
Now, the other cultures under consideration did not blend the social
order and the natural order at all;they were unconcerned by the distinc-
tion.To be unaware of a dichotomy is not at all the same thing as com-
bining two sets into one—still less “getting beyond” the distinction be-
tween the two.
Viewed through the lens of an anthropology that has finally become
symmetrical or pluralist, the other cultures appear much more trou-
bling today: they marshal categorizing principles that regroup within
a single order—in a single collective, let us say—beings that we West-
erners insist on keeping separate, or rather, while we think it is indis-
pensable to have two houses to hold our collective, most of the other
cultures insist onnothavingtwo.From this point on they can no
longer be defined as different cultures having distinct points of view
toward a single nature—to which “we” alone would have access; it of
course becomes impossible to define them as cultures among other
cultures against a background of universal nature. There are only na-
ture-cultures, or rather collectives that seek to know, as we shall see in
Chapter 5, what they may have in common. We see now the reversal of
perspective: the savages are not the ones who appear strange because
they mix what should in no case be mixed, “things” and “persons”; we
Westerners are the odd ones, we who have been living up to now in
the strange belief that we had to separate “things” on the one hand
and “persons” on the other into two distinct collectives, according to
two incommensurable forms of collection.^55
The feeling of strangeness that another culture provokes is of inter-
est only if it leads one to reflect on the strangeness of one’s own; oth-
erwise it degenerates into exoticism, Orientalism, Occidentalism. In
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
45